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Bob Saget 2.0
theodp writes "Slate makes a pretty convincing argument that YouTube and its knock-offs can trace their roots back to America's Funniest Home Videos." From the article: "The show's stock in trade was to find the lowest common denominator and then hit it in the crotch. Consider this list of select highlights from the show's 'Best of Kids & Animals' DVD: a kid doing a cannonball onto his dad's groin, a baby running into a church pew, a dog peeing on a wedding dress, and a kid clocking his dad in the nuts with a helmet. While these clips are all certainly lowbrow, they've also got something else in common: They're oozing with family values."
Nyhetsankaret.com -- det bÃsta av Sveriges Nyhetssido
Now if most of youtube's content could be somewhat funny, or even "slightly more funny than bland humor" I would see comparing it to funniest home videos. Like it is, youtube is painful to endure. I would venture to say countless people singing into a qvga camera isn't exactly entertaining for most of us.
Funnypics
Anyone who hasn't already made that connection must be a bit out of touch... Heck, some of those places are even paying the submitters of the most popular videos... $10,000 grand prize anyone?
Youtube may have some low-brow physical humor, but America's "Funniest" Home Videos doesn't have TV clips and music videos. The variety alone places Youtube in an entirely different category. Plus, Youtube doesn't have those annoying voice-overs.
Esoteric reference.
speaking of bob saget and youtube...
THIS is bob saget 2.0! (NSFW)
I'm 24 years old, and I gotta admit... AFV (America's Funniest Videos) is still one of my favorite shows to watch. Sure, it's mindless content, but no other show on tv packs more laughs per minute.
Maybe it's a bit juvenile laughing at old people falling over, people getting hit in the crotch, or just general stupidity of people with too much time on your hands, but... AFV is basically a bunch of youtube videos strung together, and is funny no matter what age you are. (Just ignore the lame jokes by the host...)
Sure, there's other content on Youtube that isn't of the "funny video" variety, but... I'd say that the majority of the "viral videos" that get spread around the internet are of the funny variety, and what drives the majority of the site.
Sometimes, someone will send me a link to a video on YouTube that's pretty funny. From there, the "similar videos" function lets me find other humorous videos in the same vein (e.g. Stephen Colbert clips, MST3K clips, whatever).
However, when I approach the site's front-end, the "most X" (where X is popular, viewed, voted on, or whatever) lineups are jammed full of webcam clips, in-jokes, and episodes of anime. It's a bizarre disconnect.
I have wondered how many parents know that their teenage kids are dancing in front of the camera for youtube's global audience.
Wincopy
YouTube has vast amouns of AFV material. REAL AFV material. I just saw today footage of a mother surrounded by her quadruplets and the babies wer eall laughing thier fool heads off. That was from AFV. In fact, some people don't even bother to remove the ABC, Superstation or other bugs on the bottom of the video. Sure, there is some great original stuf out there, but there's a tone of copyrighted material out there. Bab Saget 2.0 is more like Bob Saget 1.0.
Gorkman
You can do the same comparison for just about everything, how the car has it's roots in the horsewagon, how the internet has it's root in just about any other media distribution etc...
And while I'm at it, why say "YouTube and its knock-offs", YouTube wasn't exactly the first site where one can post homevideos. YouTube is a knock-off which just happens to be the biggest.
David Hasselhoff is a General Officer in his Army... Read more here
Did they get around to implementing the "funny" feature in this version? Or was it pulled at the last minute again cos it still didn't work right?
This guy's the limit!
Actually, lowest common denominator is okay. For instance, when adding the fractions 1/6, 2/3, and 4/18, you could convert all the fractions to a denominator of 54, as in 9/54, 27/54, and 12/54. But the correct procedure is to convert them to a denominator of 18, as in 3/18, 9/18, and 4/18 (16/18, or 8/9). And the lowest common denominator is only 1 if the numbers are all integers. You can't express 1/6 as a fraction of integers with a denominator of 1.
For more, see Wikipedia.
Ah! BOB SAGET!
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
"YouTube is nothing like America's Home Videos. What a stupid analogy."
Nothing's a strong word. People have a clip they think is funny. They submit it. An audience watches it. The same part of us that finds AFV interesting is the same part that wants us to sift through the YouTube vids and find something funny.
You can find plenty of differences between AFV and YouTube, but to say they have nothing in common is absurd.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
As the german private TV sector struggles to save money wherever it can (having recently survived an almost complete crash) shows such as "clip charts" have sprung up, sampling the silliness that people put up on the likes of youtube.
he is, just look at the proof
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
I'm not sure I agree that it can be traced "back to" a TV show like AFV. That's like saying that because Christianity decries murder and adultery, that any system of morals that incorporate these same values, has its Christian roots. What we're talking about here is universal appeal: they are elements within our social makeup that inspire a natural interest.
However, the interesting thing about youtube is that with few exceptions, it is a relatively unfiltered medium. There is no marketing department behind the scenes deciding what it thinks you'll like. You pick the stuff you do find interesting, and ignore the stuff you don't. I would agree that it's a somewhat tedious process sometimes, but what's nice about the way that youtube is structured is that what started out as a dead end (something uninteresting), can sometimes lead you to something very worthwhile via the associated links that show up, or responses that people other members have posted.
My only gripe really is that I wish people would observe a bare minimum of what makes a watchable video - shooting in near-complete darkness isn't one of them, nor is movement that makes it look like the one holding the camera is having a grand mal seizure.
"YouTube: Everything Slashdotters hate about MySpace rendered as a low quality video"
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Everything I learned about America I learned from watching "America's Funniest Home Videos" and "Antiques Roadshow"
Think about it.
America's Funniest Home Videos, hosted by America's stupidest comedian... :-P
"The lowest common denominator is always 1."
Problem 1)
Find the lowest common denominator between 1/2 and 1/3.
Answer: 1
Bzzzt. Please try again.
Find the lowest common demoninator between 1/3 and 1/5.
Answer: 1
Bzzzt. Please try again.
Find the lowest common denominator between 1/5 and 1/7.
Answer: 1
Bzzzt. Please go back to 4th Grade.
Since E is a common denominator, any multiple of E is also a common denominator. Let N be a natural number. NE is also a common denominator. Assume that NE is the greatest common denominator. Thus one of the following must hold (since if they don't 2NE is a common divisor that is greater than NE):
- 2NE < NE.
- (2NE / NE) is not an integer.
One trivially doesn't hold (from our axioms of multiplication on the natural numbers). The second can be reduced to 2/1 and then to 1 using our axioms regarding multiplication and 1 is (again, axiomatically) an integer. Since we have arrived at a contradiction, our initial assumption (that NE is the greatest common denominator for two arbitrary numbers) is invalidated. Since this holds for any N, no number can be a greatest common denominator.By the way, I think you were confusing denominators (the bottom halves of fractions) with divisors (i.e. factors). The lowest common (natural number) factor of any pair of integers is always 1. Of course, 0.1 is also a common divisor of any pair of integers (as, in fact, is any rational number[2]), and so the concept of a lowest common divisor only has meaning in the domain of the integers. The greatest common divisor can be calculated recursively using Euclid's algorithm. There is a connection between the greatest common divisor and the lowest common denominator. In our earlier example, the lowest common denominator, E, is BD divided by the greatest common divisor of B and D. Since E is also the product of the prime factors of B and D, this leads to an efficient test for primality (which is far beyond the scope of this post but is not too hard to derive if you're interested).
[1] e.g. if B = 30 and D = 105, B = 3x5x7 and D = 3x5x7. E = 2x3x5x7. B/E = 7 and D/E=2. The final fractions would be 7A/2B = 7A/E and 2C/2D = 2C/E. You can then trivially add these two fractions together to get (7A+2C)/E.
[2] The proof of this is left as an exercise for the reader.
It's the middle of the night, so this post probably contains some typos. I think this proof works using Peano arithmetic, but I am too tired to check. It is only valid on the natural numbers; extending it to the integers it easy, but I am tired and lazy. And yes, I know I skipped a load of steps; this is meant as an illustration rather than a strict mathematical proof.
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